Successful financial institutions recognize that their customers may wish to perform financial transactions, such as accessing their accounts, through a variety of different ways and at different times. For example, while in the past customers were required to visit their bank branches during office hours to make transactions, today sophisticated banks make their services available electronically on a 24-hour basis. A number of different electronic devices exist to access one's bank account to perform transactions, including an automated teller machine ("ATM"), a personal computer at a work or home location, a web browser on the internet or a screen phone. As technologies develop, other electronic mechanisms to access financial services will become available. The ability of financial institutions, including banks, to accommodate the ever-expanding host of access devices is an increasingly important part of getting and maintaining customers.
A major problem faced by a financial institution in accommodating the various access devices is assuring that the computer software program (also called "applications") made available to customers by the bank are compatible with the various devices used by the customers. For example, the protocols used to display information on an ATM may be different than the protocols used to display that information through a web browser on a user's personal computer. There may be different communications protocols for the displays of the devices and different encoding standards of the data, once the data gets to the display device. Traditionally, applications have been written so that they very tightly "couple" the sequence of the application with the actual encoding of the presentation of that application. Thus, new devices with different encoding standards and protocols have required that the application programs be rewritten.
Traditionally, financial institutions have responded to this problem by writing different versions of the same computer application, with each variation being compatible to a particular access device. thus, one version of a bill-paying program is written to be compatible with an ATM, another version of the same program is written to be compatible with a personal computer and yet another version of the same program is written to be compatible with a web browser on the internet.
Writing, maintaining and updating these different versions is expensive and time-consuming. Accordingly, there is a need for a system which makes a single version of an application program compatible with a number of different access devices.
An example of compatibility is making sure that all of the information to be displayed to the user is, in fact, displayed on the screen of the device being used. For example, when a relatively small screen display device is used, such as screens on screenphones, there may not be a great deal of space to display to the user the information and prompts required to run the program (for example, name of payee for bill payment, address of payee, etc.). In such an instance, abbreviations of phrases and the positioning of the icons, prompts and other information on the screen is readable ad intelligible by the user. Where larger screens are involved, such as personal computer screens or television screens, there is more space and in such an instance, larger phrasing and greater spacing between icons, prompts, ad other information is desirable. Thus, there is a need for a method and system to identify the type of screen being used and automatically customize the information to be displayed to the particular screen.
Further, because many banking programs were written some time ago, the devices originally intended for use with these programs may no longer be manufactured, due to replacement of the old devices with new devices. In such instances, the financial institution may be required to rewrite the application in order to use it al all on new devices. This is expensive and time-consuming. Accordingly, there is a need to make existing programs automatically compatible with new access devices.